Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

For 5p at a village fete I bought
Old Homer-Lucan who popped Keats’s eyes,
Print smaller than the Book of Common Prayer
But Swinburne in the front, whose judgement is
Always immaculate. I’ll never read a tenth
Of it in what life I have left to me
But I did look at The Georgics, as he calls
The Works and Days, and there I saw, not quite
The view from Darien but something strange
And balking — Australia, my own country
And its edgy managers — in the picture of
Euboeaen husbandry, terse family feuds
And the minds of gods tangential to the earth.

Like a Taree smallholder splitting logs
And philosophising on his dangling billies,
The poet mixes hard agrarian instances
With sour sucks to his brother. Chapman, too,
That poetry perpetual motion machine,
Grinds up the classics like bone meal from
The abbatoirs. And the same blunt patriotism,
A long-winded, emphatic, kelpie yapping
About our land, our time, our fate, our strange
And singular way of moons and showers, lakes
Filling oddly — yes, Australians are Boeotians,
Thick as headlands, and, to be fair, with days
As robust as the Scythian wind on stone.

To teach your grandmother to suck eggs
Is a textbook possibility in New South Wales
Or outside Ascra. And such a genealogy too!
The Age of Iron is here, but oh the memories
Of Gold — pioneers preaching to the stringybarks,
Boring the land to death with verses and with
Mental Homes. ‘Care-flying ease’ and ‘Gift-
devouring Kings’ become the Sonata of the Shotgun
And Europe’s Entropy; for ‘the axle-tree, the quern,
The hard, fate-fostered man’ you choose among
The hand castrator, kerosene in honey tins
And mystic cattlemen. The Land of City States
Greets Australia in a farmer’s gods.

Hesiod’s father, caught in a miserable village,
Not helped by magic names like Helicon,
Sailed to improve his fortunes, and so did
All our fathers. In turn, their descendants
Lacked initiative, other than the doctors’ daughters
Who tripped to England. Rough-nosed Hesiod
Was sure of his property to a slip-rail —
Had there been grants, he’d have farmed all
Summer and spent winter in Corinth
At the Creative Writing Class. Chapman, too,
Would vie with Steiner for the Pentecostal
Silver Tongue. Some Of us feel at home nowhere,
Others in one generation fuse with the land.

I salute him, then, the blunt old Greek whose way
Of life was as cunning as organic. His poet
Followers still make me feel deraciné
Within myself. One day they’re on the campus,
The next in wide hats at a branding or
Sheep drenching, not actually performing
But looking the part and getting instances
For odes that bruise the blood. And history,
So interior a science it almost seems
Like true religion — who would have thought
Australia was the point of all that craft
Of politics in Europe? The apogee, it seems,
Is where your audience and its aspirations are.

‘The colt, and mule, and horn-retorted steer’ —
A good iambic line to paraphrase.
Long storms have blanched the million bones
Of the Aegean, and as many hurricanes
Will abrade the headstones of my native land:
Sparrows acclimatise but I still seek
The permanently upright city where
Speech is nature and plants conceive in pots,
Where one escapes from what one is and who
One was, where home is just a postmark
And country wisdom clings to calendars,
The opposite of a sunburned truth-teller’s
World, haunted by precepts and the Pleiades.